Theatre Review: DenMarked at The Courtyard Theatre, N1

A funny, intense, confessional autobiography played out through hip hop, spoken word and Shakespeare.

Brought up on a succession of south London council estates, Conrad Murray’s future looks set out before it’s even begun. With an upbringing that included violent father, who Murray once sees strangle his mother until her eyeballs bleed, his early brushes with the law, school suspensions and a spell in prison seem inevitable.

But Murray, a gifted performer with a talent for words, is lucky enough have adults in his life who help encourage him to break away from his circumstances. Among those grown-ups is his tenacious social worker Judy and a teacher who gives him a copy of Hamlet.

That copy of Hamlet is central to Murray’s life and too his engaging one-man show that examines how we are – like Hamlet – marked by events in our life and how we react to them.

Like the Danish prince, Murray knows our world is what we perceive it to be, and our place in it is how we imagine it to be – good and bad are nothing more than human concepts. He quotes Hamlet’s line “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” several times, a reminder that even in the darkest of places, you can find a way out of that cage with a mind reset.

Conrad Murray is an engaging performer, not least because this is his story. Uncomfortable at times – should we be laughing at his counsellor’s Freudian-focused questions or annoyed at their middle class mis-judgement? You get the impression this show is different every night, depending on the audience’s’ reaction to his unflinching life story.

Murray’s big talent, and one that got him out of scrapes, is his gift for beats and rhymes that he demonstrates inbetween the monologue, rapping to live mixes of looped samples. The tunes add another layer to his story, bringing texture and emotion to his background that isn’t there in the text. The final number in particular was had a wonderful melody overlapped with Murray’s rap and a hook so catchy I was thoroughly caught in Murray’s storytelling net.